As it was, of course, the trail in the snow was so plain Longarm didn’t even have to wait for daylight to follow it. He simply ambled along in their path, not even having to break trail for himself. They had already gone and done it for him.
The path led a half mile or so to a small dugout gouged into the side of a low hill. The dugout looked old. It might have been someone’s line camp at one time, or even the site of a failed homestead.
Whatever it used to be, now it had been fixed up with some fresh sod on the roof and a windbreak of piled stones in front of the leather-hung door.
A plume of smoke lifted into the sky from a sheetmetal chimney at the back of the low roof. A lean-to had been built to serve as a storage shed. Longarm took a look inside—surprises were not something he craved at the moment—and found it filled with saddles, bridles, and similar gear waiting for springtime.
Longarm sighed. There wasn’t any point in screwing around here. Better to get it over with.
And there wasn’t any need to be subtle either. The men waiting inside would be expecting someone.
It was just that it was not Longarm whose entrance they anticipated.
He made sure there wasn’t anyone outside in the crapper. Again, no surprises were wanted. It wouldn’t much do for someone to come up behind him with a gun in hand, say, or even a billet of stove wood that could be used for altering the shape and the contents of a man’s skull. Then he simply walked over to the door and let himself in, Colt already in hand.
“How’d things … Jesus! You.”
“Uh, huh. Me.”
“But where …?”
“Madlock and Benson are both dead. I was waiting for them at the Travis place. They were stupid. They tried to shoot it out with me. I suggest neither of you boys makes that same mistake. I do this for a living, remember. You’d be in way the hell over your heads.”
Jason Tyler was lying on a bunk with a pile of blankets tucked chin high. Ronnie Gordon had been feeding wood into the stove when Longarm interrupted the chore.
“Did you … I mean, how’d you know it was us?”
“You want the truth, Tyler? I didn’t. Oh, you boys were on my list of possibilities. Naturally, you all being young and horny and broke until you could start drawing pay again. But I tell you true, son. I didn’t think it would be you four. I thought better of you than that.”
“But how …?”
“Why was I laying in wait this morning? Son, I told that story all over Kittstown so anyone interested in keeping track of the rumors would know I was gonna make my arrest today. And whoever was guilty … I didn’t have to know who that was … whichever sons o’ bitches was guilty would just naturally figure they had to come out and destroy the evidence before I could get to it.”
“You trapped us.”
“I did that for a fact, yes.”
“That isn’t fair, you know.”
“Neither is murder. Nor the assorted other things you’ve done.”
Ronnie Gordon stood and shook his head sadly. “I can’t … I can’t face going to the gallows, Marshal. That would purely kill my folks. They’re decent people. They wouldn’t understand.”
“Rape. Murder. No, those things are kinda hard for decent folks to accept. Maybe you should of thought of that before you killed that girl.”
“I didn’t … me and Jason didn’t have nothing to do with that, Marshal. It was all Billy and Carl. They’re the ones raped her. It was Billy Madlock that beat her to death. I’ll swear to that, Marshal.”
“So will I,” Tyler put in.
“Reckon you can tell that to the judge. Mayhaps he’ll even believe you.”
“You don’t, Marshal?”
“I told you, son. I do this for a living. Do you think I’ve ever once arrested a guilty man? Of course not. They’re every one of them innocent. Pure as the driven snow, like the saying goes. Just ask ‘em. They’ll tell you.”
“Marshal, I mean it. I can’t hang. I just can’t.”
“That ain’t up to me, Gordon. A judge and jury will take care of that.”
“I just can’t. I really ca-“
Gordon whirled and grabbed for a battered old Sharps carbine that was leaning against the wall beside him.
It was a crazy thing to do.
But then the choice was clearly his. And he did indeed mean that he couldn’t stand to swing. He would rather accept the alternative than the disgrace.
Longarm obliged the young fool with a bullet that hit him high in the throat and sprayed the hot stove with fresh blood. The blood sizzled and stank, filling the dugout with a sickening stench.
Longarm scarcely noticed. Jason Tyler was still alive. And Tyler’s hands were underneath his blankets where Longarm could not see what they might be busy doing.
The muzzle of the big Colt was aimed unwavering on a spot just about a half inch above the bridge of Tyler’s nose.
“God, don’t shoot me, please don’t shoot me, Marshal, please.”
“Stick your hands out from under those covers,” Longarm ordered.
Tyler’s hands appeared with a magician’s speed. They were empty. And shaking.
“Now kick the covers back.”
“Anything you say, Marshal, just please God don’t shoot, don’t shoot.”
The smells of saltpeter and sulfur from the burnt gunpowder fought to overcome the equally strong stink of the scorched blood.
Longarm felt a mite queasy himself under those combined influences. And they were too much for Jason Tyler. The terrified cowboy puked all over the front of his long underwear. But he didn’t take his hands down even then.
“Why’d you kill her?” It was probably a stupid question. Shit-for-brains criminals virtually never told the truth. Not about hardly anything, including their own right names. But it was a question Longarm had to ask anyway.
“She … it was an accident, like.”
“An accident?” Longarm moved close behind Tyler, clamped one steel cuff onto Tyler’s left wrist, and jerked the arm down so it was held at the small of the cowboy’s back.
“We were on our way to town. For a drink, play a little poker, you know.”
“Uh, huh.” Longarm brought Tyler’s right hand down as well and snapped the other cuff in place, securing his hands behind him.
“We saw her coming toward us. Just walking slow and looking all around. Kind of … enjoying things. You know?”
“Yeah. I know.”
“We’d about used up our pay already … a run of bad luck … but the last we went over to Norma’s place Billy’d had this Nancy, and he liked her real well. He said we all ought to have a go at her, so we stopped her and asked. She got all snotty with us. She said no, it was Sunday and she wasn’t working. If we wanted to fuck we could come to the whorehouse later on sometime and she’d give us whatever we wanted. Well, what we wanted was to have some pussy right then. And we didn’t like some little bitch whore like that saying no when Billy’d already fucked her once and she said herself she’d take us on another time. I mean, that made us mad. And Carl, he grabbed her first. I think it was him anyway. It was kind of like once we got started, we all got into the spirit of it.”
“Uh, huh,” Longarm said again, restraining an impulse to kick Tyler in the back of the head. It was easy to kill someone that way. Real easy.
“And we were right there close to Old Man Travis’s place and we knew he wasn’t home and … well, we dragged her in there. So nobody could hear her shouting, see. She was screaming her stupid head off. And it’s not like she was some damn virgin faced with a fate worse than death. She was a whore, for God’s sake. A lousy stinking whore. Where did she come off telling us we couldn’t have any.
“So anyhow, one thing led to another. We all of us screwed her. A couple times each, I guess. But she wouldn’t shut up. So Billy hit her, to get her to quiet down, like, so we could leave. But she wouldn’t leave it be. She was hollering crazy stuff, like how she was going to have the law on us for rape. Well, that was a laugh. We all knew better than that. But then she did a really dumb thing. She kicked Billy. Square in the balls. God, that pissed him off something awful. I mean, it would have made me that mad too. So he punched her. Just as hard as he could. And then he hit her again, and Carl hit her and Ronnie and … and I kicked and hit her some too. I mean, we all did. We just … forgot, kind of, what we were doing. And the next thing you know, she was dead. We hadn’t meant for her to be. Honest. It just … happened.”